 CHAPTER I Nightmare Abbey, a venerable family mansion in a highly picturesque state of semi-delapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry land between the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln, had the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. This gentleman was naturally of an atrabularious temperament, and much trebled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly called blue devils. He had been deceived in an early friendship. He had been crossed in love, and had offered his hand from peak to a lady, who accepted it from interest, and who, in so doing, violently tore asunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment. Her vanity was gratified by being the mistress of a very extensive, if not very lively, establishment, but all the springs of her sympathies were frozen. Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them, the participation of affection was wanting. All that they could purchase for her became indifferent to her, because that which they could not purchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, for their sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end, that Riches rightly used are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In this willful blight of her affections she found them valueless as means. They had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind's internal disorder, and thus became, by degrees, an accomplished scold. She often went her daily rounds through a series of deserted apartments, every creature in the house vanishing at the creek of her shoe, much more at the sound of her voice, to which the nature of things affords no simile, for, as far as the voice of woman, when attuned by gentleness and love, transcends all other sounds and harmony, so far does it surpass all others in discord, when stretched into unnatural shrillness by anger and impatience. Mr. Glowery used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for every one in it led the life of a dog. Disappointed both in love and in friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world—Vita Lechette, a good dinner, and this his parsimonious lady seldom suffered him to enjoy. But one morning, like Sir Leoline in Christabel, he woke and found his lady dead, and remained a very consulate widower with one small child. This only son-in-air Mr. Glowery had christened Sithrup, from the name of a maternal ancestor, who had hanged himself one rainy day in a fit of tidium vitae, and had been eulogised by a coroner's jury in the comprehensive phrase of fello di sei, on which account Mr. Glowery held his memory in high honour, and made a punch-bowl of his skull. When Sithrup grew up he was sent, as usual, to a public school where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him, and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head, having finished his education to the high satisfaction of the master and fellows of his college, who had, in testimony of their approbation, presented him with a silver fish slice, on which his name figured at the head of a laudatory inscription in some semi-barbarous dialect of Anglo-Saxonised Latin. His fellow students, however, who drove tandem and random in great perfection, and were connoisseurs in good ends, had taught him to drink deep ere he departed. He had passed much of his time with these choice spirits, and had seen the rays of the midnight lamp tremble on many a lengthening file of empty bottles. He passed his vacations, sometimes at Nightmare Abbey, sometimes in London, at the house of his uncle, Mr. Hillary, a very cheerful and elastic gentleman, who had married the sister of the melancholy, Mr. Glowery. The company that frequented his house was the gayest of the gay. Sithrup danced with the ladies, and drank with the gentleman, and was pronounced by both a very accomplished, charming fellow, and an honour to the university. At the house of Mr. Hillary, Sithrup first saw the beautiful Miss Emily Girouette. He fell in love, which is nothing new. He was favourably received, which is nothing strange. Mr. Glowery and Mr. Girouette had a meeting on the occasion, and quarreled about the terms of the bargain, which is neither new nor strange. The lovers were torn asunder, weeping and vowing everlasting constancy, and in three weeks after this tragical event, the lady was led a smiling bride to the altar, by the honourable Mr. Lackwit, which is neither strange nor new. Sithrup received this intelligence at Nightmare Abbey, and was half distracted on the occasion. It was his first disappointment, and prayed deeply on his sensitive spirit. His father, to comfort him, read him a commentary on Ecclesiastes, which he had himself composed, and which demonstrated incontrovertibly that all is vanity. He insisted particularly on the text, One man among a thousand have I found, but a woman amongst all those have I not found. How could he expect it, said Sithrup, when the whole thousand were locked up in his sororario? His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like that in which we live. Locked up or at large, said Mr. Glowery, the result is the same. Their minds are always locked up, and vanity and interests keep the key. I speak feelingly, Sithrup. I am sorry for it, sir, said Sithrup, but how is it that their minds are locked up? The fault is in their artificial education, which studiously models them into mere musical dolls to be set out for sale in the great toy shop of society. To be sure, said Mr. Glowery, their education is not so well finished as yours has been. And your idea of a musical doll is good. I bought one myself, but it was confoundedly out of tune. But whatever be the cause, Sithrup, the effect is certainly this, that one is pretty nearly as good as another, as far as any judgment can be formed of them before marriage. It is only after marriage that they show their true qualities, as I know by bitter experience. Marriage is, therefore, a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better. For, if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple but a complicated disappointment, the loss of labour and money being super-added to the disappointment of drawing a blank, which, constituting simply and entirely, the grievance of him who has chosen his ticket at random, is, from its simplicity, the more indurable. This very excellent reasoning was thrown away upon Sithrup who retired to his tower as dismal and disconsolate as before. The tower which Sithrup inhabited stood at the southeastern angle of the Abbey, and on the southern side the foot of the tower opened on a terrace, which was called the Garden, though nothing grew on it but ivy and a few amphibious weeds. The southwestern tower, which was ruinous and full of owls, might with equal propriety, have been called the Aviary. This terrace, or garden, or terrace garden, or garden terrace, the reader may name it Ad Libitum, took in an oblique view of the open sea, and fronted a long tract of level seacoast and a fine monotony of fends and windmills. The reader will judge, from what we have said, that this building was a sort of castellated Abbey, and it will probably occur to him to inquire if it had been one of the strongholds of the ancient church militant. Whether this was the case, or how far it had been indebted to the taste of Mr. Glauery's ancestors, for any transmutations from its original state are, unfortunately, circumstances not within the pale of our knowledge. The northwestern tower contained the apartments of Mr. Glauery. The moat, at its base, and the fends beyond, comprised the whole of his prospect. This moat surrounded the Abbey, and was in immediate contact with the walls on every side but the south. The northeastern tower was appropriated to the Domestics, who Mr. Glauery always chose by one of two criterions, a long face or a dismal name. His butler was raven, his steward was crow, his valet was skellet. Mr. Glauery maintained that the valet was of French extraction, and that his name was squelette. His grooms were medics and graves. On one occasion, being in want of a footman, he received a letter from a person signing himself, Diggory Deathshead, and lost no time in securing this acquisition, but on Diggory's arrival Mr. Glauery was horror-struck by the sight of a round, ruddy face and a pair of laughing eyes. Deathshead was always grinning, not a ghastly smile but the grin of a comic mask, and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter that Mr. Glauery gave him his discharge. Diggory, however, had stayed long enough to make conquests of all the old gentleman's maids, and left him a flourishing colony of young Deathsheads to join chorus with the owls that had before been the exclusive choristers of Nightmare Abbey. The main body of the building was divided into rooms of state, spacious apartments for feasting, and numerous bedrooms for visitors, who, however, were few and far between. Family interests compelled Mr. Glauery to receive occasional visits from Mr. and Mrs. Hillary, who paid them from the same motive, and, as the lively gentleman on these occasions found few conductors for his exuberant gaiety, he became like a double-charged electric jar, which often exploded in some burst of outrageous merriment to the signal discomposure of Mr. Glauery's nerves. Another occasional visitor, much more to Mr. Glauery's tape, was Mr. Floskey. Footnote. Mr. Floskey is a corruption of Filoskey, meaning a lover or sectator of shadows. And a footnote. A very lacrimose and morbid gentleman, of some note in the literary world, but in his own estimation of much more merit than name. The part of his character which recommended him to Mr. Glauery was his very fine sense of the grim and the tearful. Nobody could relate a dismal story with so many minutiae of super-erogatory wretchedness. No one could call up a raw head and bloody bones with so many adjuncts and circumstances of gasliness. Mystery was his mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open and saw ghosts dancing around him at noontide. He had been in his youth and enthusiast for liberty and had hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery and every form of vice and misery from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done, and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done, that the overthrow of the feudal fortresses of tyranny and superstition was the greatest calamity that had ever befallen mankind, and that their only hope now was to rake the rubbish together and rebuild it without any of those loopholes by which the light had originally crept in. To qualify himself for a co-agitor in this laudable task he plunged into the central opacity of Kantian metaphysics and lay perdue several years in transcendental darkness till the common daylight of common sense became intolerable to his eyes. He called the sun an igneous fatuous, and exhorted all who would listen to his friendly voice, which were about as many as called God-save King Richard, to shelter themselves from its delusive radiance in the obscure haunt of old philosophy. This word old had great charms for him, the good old times were always on his lips, meeting the days when polemic theology was in its prime, and rival prelates beat the drama ecclesiastic with herculean vigor till the one wound up his series of syllogisms with a very orthodox conclusion of roasting the other. But the dearest friend of Mr. Glowery and his most welcomed guest was Mr. Tubad, the Manicheum millenarian. The twelfth verse of the twelfth chapter of revelations was always in his mouth, Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea, for the devil is come among you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. He maintained that the supreme dominion of the world was, for wise purposes, given over for a while to the evil principle, and that this precise period of time, commonly called the Enlightened Age, was the point of his plenitude of power. He used to add that by and by he would be cast down, and a high and happy order of things succeed. But he never omitted the saving clause, not in our time, which last words were always echoed in doleful response by the sympathetic Mr. Glowery. Another and very frequent visitor was the reverend Mr. Larynx, the vicar of Claydike, a village about ten miles distant, a good-natured, accommodating divine, who was always most obligingly ready to take a dinner and a bed at the house of any country gentleman in distress for a companion. Nothing came amiss to him, a game of billiards, at chess, at drafts, at back-emmen, at piquette, or at all fours in a tet-a-tet, or any game on the cards, round, square, or triangular, in a party of any number exceeding two. He would even dance among friends, rather than that a lady, even if she were on the wrong side of thirty, should sit still for want of a partner. For a ride, a walk, or a sale in the morning, a song after dinner, a ghost-story after supper, a bottle of port with a squire, or a cup of green tea with his lady, for all or any of these, or for anything else that was agreeable to any one else, consistently with a dye of his coat, the reverend Mr. Larynx was at all times equally ready. When at nightmare Abbey he would condole with Mr. Glowry, drink Madera with Sithirp, crack jokes with Mr. Hillary, hand Mrs. Hillary to the piano, take charge of her fan and gloves, and turn over her music with surprising dexterity, quote revelations with Mr. too bad, and lament the good old times of futile darkness with the transcendental Mr. Floskey. End of chapter. Chapter 2 of Nightmare Abbey. This leaper-box recording is in the public domain and is read by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Nightmare Abbey. By Thomas Love Peacock. Chapter 2 Shortly after the disastrous termination of Sithirp's passion for Miss Emily Giroette, Mr. Glowry found himself, much against his will, involved in a lawsuit, which compelled him to dance attendance on the High Court of Chansary. Sithirp was left alone at Nightmare Abbey. He was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes. He wandered about the ample pile, or along the garden terrace, with his cogitative faculties immersed in cajabundity of cogitation. The terrace terminated at the southwestern tower, which, as we have said, was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Sithirp take his evening seat on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting against the ruined wall, a thick canopy of ivy with an owl in it over his head, and the sorrows of verter in his hand. He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, injustice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes, and the cure would have been radical if disappointment in love and total solitude had not conspired to bring on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and, by the recommendation of Mr. Floskey, to pour over ponderous tomes of transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up into vigorous and abundant vegetation. He now became trouble with the passion for reforming the world. Footnote. The passion for reforming the world see Forsythe principles of moral science. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals and bands of Illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with horrid mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable Eleutherox and ghastly Confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico dressing gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator. Is the result of opinion, and to new-model opinion, would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power. It is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for their own selfish purposes of a grandisement and appropriation. What if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened? No. The many must be always in leading strings, but let them have wise and honest conductors, a few to think, and many to act. That is the only basis of perfect society. So thought the ancient philosophers, they had their esoterical and exoterical doctrines. So thinks the sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but the initiated can comprehend. Such were the views of those secret associations of Illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the great wilderness of society, as the beast selects honey from the flowers of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain, which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded opinion and regenerated the world. Scyther proceeded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas, and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapped up in the monk's hood of transcendental technology, but filled with a sense of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment, and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing, for the explosion, if any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey. And some months afterwards he received a letter from a monk, who, after a few months, afterwards he received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the balance. Scythera did not despair. Seven copies, he thought, have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candlesticks with which I will illuminate the world. Scythera had a certain portion of Mechanical Genius, which his romantic projects tended to develop. He constructed models of cells and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have baffled the skill of the Parisian police. He took the opportunity of his father's absence to smuggle a dumb carpenter into the abbey, and between them they gave reality to one of these models in Scythera's tower. Scythera foresaw that a great leader of human regeneration would be involved in fearful delimas, and determined, for the benefit of mankind in general, to adopt all possible precautions for the preservation of himself. The servants, even the women, had been tutored into silence, profound stillness reigned throughout and around the abbey, except when the occasional shutting of a door would peel in long reverberations through the galleries, or the heavy tread of the pensive butler would wake the hollow echoes of the hall. Scythera stalked about like the grand inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars. In his evening meditations on the terrace, under the ivy of the ruined tower, the only sounds that came to his ear were the rustling of the wind in the ivy, the plaintive voices of the feathered choristers, the owls, and the occasional striking of the abbey-clock, and the monotonous dash of the sea on its low and level shore. In the meantime he drank madera and laid deep schemes for a thorough repair of the crazy fabric of human nature. OF SIMPSONVILLE SOUTH CAROLINA NIGHTMARE ABBY by Thomas Love Peacock CHAPTER III Mr. Glowery returned from London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythera up in a mood most sympathetically tragic, and they vied with each other in enlivening their cups, by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate age, and occasionally interspersing divers grim jokes about graves, worms, and epitaphs. Mr. Glowery's friends, whom we have mentioned in the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous visit. At the same time arrived Scythera's friend and fellow collegian, the Honorable Mr. Listless. Mr. Glowery had discovered this fashionable young gentleman in London, stretched on the rack of a too easy chair, and devoured with a gloomy and misanthropical nilocuro, and had pressed him so earnestly to take the benefit of the pure country air at Nightmare Abbey, that Mr. Listless, finding it would give him more trouble to refuse than to comply, summoned his French valet, Fatou, and told him he was going to licensure. On this simple hint, Fatou went to work, and the Imperials were packed, and the post-chariot was at the door, without the honourable Mr. Listless having said or thought another syllable on the subject. Mr. and Mrs. Hillary brought with them an orphan niece, a daughter of Mr. Glowery's youngest sister, who had made a runaway love-match with an Irish officer. The lady's fortune disappeared in the first year. Love, by a natural consequence, disappeared in the second. The Irishman himself, by a still more natural consequence, disappeared in the third. Mr. Glowery had allowed his sister an annuity, and she had lived in retirement with her only daughter, whom at her death, which had recently happened, she commended to the care of Mrs. Hillary. Mrs. Marianetta Celestina O'Carroll was a very blooming and accomplished young lady. Being a compound of the Allegro Vivace of the O'Carrolls, and of the Andante Doloroso of the Gloweries, she exhibited in her own character all the diversities of an April sky. Her hair was light brown, her eyes hazel, and sparkling with a mild but fluctuating light. Her features regular, her lips full, and of equal size, and her person surpassingly graceful. She was a proficient in music. Her conversation was sprightly, but always on subjects light in their nature, and limited in their interest. For moral sympathies, in any general sense, had no place in her mind. She had some coquetry, and more caprice, liking and disliking almost in the same moment, pursuing an object with earnestness while it seemed unattainable, and rejecting it when in her power as not worth the trouble of possession. Whether she was touched with a penchant for her cousin Sithrup, or was merely curious to see what effect the tender passion would have on so autré, a person, she had not been three days in the abbey before she threw out all the lures of her beauty and accomplishments to make a prize of his heart. Sithrup proved an easy conquest. The image of Miss Emily Girouette was already sufficiently dimmed by the power of philosophy and the exercise of reason. For to these influences, or to any influence but the true one, are usually ascribed the mental cures performed by the great physician time. Sithrup's romantic dreams had indeed given him many pure anticipated cognitions of combinations of beauty and intelligence, which, he had some misgivings, were not exactly realized in his cousin Marionetta. But, in spite of these misgivings, he soon became distractedly in love, which, when the young lady clearly perceived, she altered her tactics, and assumed as much coldness and reserve as she had before shown ardent and ingenuous attachment. Sithrup was confounded at the sudden change, but, instead of falling at her feet and requesting an explanation, he retreated to his tower, muffled himself in his nightcap, seated himself in the president's chair of his imaginary secret tribunal, summoned Marionetta with all terrible formalities, frightened her out of her wits, disclosed himself, and clasped the beautiful penitent to his bosom. While he was acting this reverie, in the moment in which the awful president of the secret tribunal was throwing back his cowl and his mantle, and discovering himself to the lovely culprit as her adoring and magnanimous lover, the door of the study opened, and the real Marionetta appeared. The motives which had led her to the tower were a little penitence, a little concern, a little affection, and a little fear as to what the sudden secession of Sithrup, occasioned by her sudden change of manner, might portend. She had tapped several times unheard, and of course unanswered, and at length, timidly, and cautiously opening the door, she discovered him standing up before a black velvet chair, which was mounted on an old oak table, in the act of throwing open his striped calico dressing-gown and flinging away his nightcap, which is what the French call an imposing attitude. Each stood a few moments fixed in their respective places, the lady in astonishment, and the gentleman in confusion. Marionetta was the first to break silence. For heaven's sake, said she, my dear Sithrup, what is the matter? For heaven's sake, indeed, said Sithrup, springing from the table. For your sake, Marionetta, and you are my heaven, distraction is the matter. I adore you, Marionetta, and your cruelty drives me mad." He threw himself at her knees, devoured her hand with kisses, and breathed a thousand vows in the most passionate language of romance. Marionetta listened a long time in silence till her lover had exhausted his eloquence and paused for a reply. She then said, with a very arched look, I prithee deliver thyself like a man of this world. The levity of this quotation, and of the manner in which it was delivered, jarred so discordantly on the high-rot enthusiasm of the romantic Imerato, that he sprang upon his feet and beat his forehead with his clenched fist. The young lady was terrified, and deeming it expedient to soothe him, took one of his hands in hers, placed the other hand on his shoulder, looked up in his face with a winning seriousness, and said, in the tenderest possible tone, What would you have, Sithrup? Sithrup was in heaven again. What would I have? What but you, Marionetta? You for the companion of my studies, the partner of my thoughts, the auxiliary of my great designs for the emancipation of mankind. I am afraid I should be but a poor auxiliary, Sithrup. What would you have me do? Do as Rosalia does with Carlos, divine Marionetta, let us each open a vein in the other's arm, mix our blood in a bowl, and drink it as a sacrament of love. Then we shall see visions of transcendental illumination, and soar on the wings of ideas into the space of pure intelligence. Marionetta could not reply. She had not so strong a stomach as Rosalia, and turned sick at the proposition. She disengaged herself suddenly from Sithrup, sprang through the door of the tower, and fled with precipitation along the corridors. Sithrup pursued her, crying, Stop, stop, Marionetta, my life, my love, and was gaining rapidly on her flight when, at an ill-oment corner where two corridors ended in an angle at the head of a staircase, he came into sudden and violent contact with Mr. Tubad, and they both plunged together to the foot of the stairs, like two billiard balls into one pocket. This gave the young lady time to escape and enclose herself in her chamber, while Mr. Tubad, rising slowly and rubbing his knees and shoulders, said, You will see, my dear Sithrup, in this little incident, one of the innumerable proofs of the temporary supremacy of the devil, for what but a systematic design and concurrent contrivance of evil could have made the angles of time and place coincide in our unfortunate persons at the head of this accursed staircase. Nothing else, certainly, said Sithrup. You are perfectly in the right, Mr. Tubad. Evil and mischief and misery and confusion and vanity and vexation of spirit and death and disease and assassination and war and poverty and pestilence and famine and avarice and selfishness and wrecker and jealousy and spleen and malevolence and the disappointments of philanthropy and the faithlessness of friendship and the crosses of love all prove the accuracy of your views and the truth of your system, and it is not impossible that the infernal interruption of this fall downstairs may throw a color of evil on the whole of my future existence. My dear boy, said Mr. Tubad, you have a fine eye for consequences. So, saying, he embraced Sithrup, who retired, with a disconsolate step, to dress for dinner, while Mr. Tubad stalked across the hall, repeating, woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea, for the devil has come among you, having great wrath. CHAPTER IV The flight of Marionetta and the pursuit of Sithrup had been witnessed by Mr. Glowery, who, in consequence, narrowly observed his son and his niece in the evening, and concluding from their manner that there was a better understanding between them than he wished to see, he determined on obtaining the next morning from Sithrup a full and satisfactory explanation. He, therefore, shortly after breakfast, entered Sithrup's tower, with a very grave face and said, without ceremony or preface, So, sir, you are in love with your cousin. Sithrup with his little hesitation answered, Yes, sir, that is candid at least, and she is in love with you. I wish she were, sir. You know she is, sir. Indeed, sir, I do not. But you hope she is. I do, from my soul. Now that is very provoking, Sithrup, and very disappointing. I could not have supposed that you, Sithrup Glowery, of nightmare Abbey, would have been infatuated with such a dancing, laughing, singing, thoughtless, careless, merry-hearted thing as Marionetta, in all respects the reverse of you and me. It is very disappointing, Sithrup. And do you know, sir, that Marionetta has no fortune? It is the more reason, sir, that her husband should have one. The more reason for her, but not for you. My wife had no fortune, and I had no consolation in my calamity. And do you reflect, sir, what an enormous slice this lawsuit has cut out of our family estate? We who used to be the greatest landed proprietors in Lincolnshire. To be sure, sir, we had more acres of fenn than any man on this coast, but what are fenns to love? What are dykes and windmills to Marionetta? And what, sir, is love to an windmill? Not grist, I am certain. Besides, sir, I have made a choice for you. I have made a choice for you, Sithrup. Beauty, genius, accomplishments, and a great fortune into the bargain. Such a lovely, serious creature, in a fine state of high dissatisfaction with the world, and everything in it. Such a delightful surprise I had prepared for you. Sir, I have pledged my honour to the contract, the honour of the glories of nightmare Abbey, and now, sir, what is to be done. Indeed, sir, I cannot say. I claim, on this occasion, that liberty of action which is the co-natal prerogative of every rational being. Liberty of action, sir? There is no such thing as liberty of action. We are all slaves and puppets of a blind and unpathetic necessity. Very true, sir, but liberty of action between individuals consists in their being differently influenced or modified by the same universal necessity, so that the results are unconstantaneous, and their respective necessitative volitions clash and fly off in a tangent. Your logic is good, sir, but you are aware, too, that one individual may be a medium of adhibiting to another a mode or form of necessity, which may have more or less influence in the production of consentaneity. And therefore, sir, if you do not comply with my wishes in this instance, you have had your own way in everything else. I shall be under the necessity of disinheriting you, though I shall do it with tears in my eyes. Having said these words, he vanished suddenly in the dread of Scythrop's logic. Mr. Glowery immediately sought Mrs. Hillary, and communicated to her his views on the case in point. Mrs. Hillary, as the phrase is, was as fond of Marianetta as if she had been her own child. But there is always a but on these occasions. She could do nothing for her in the way of fortune, as she had two hopeful sons, who were finishing their education at brazen nose, and who would not like to encounter any diminution of their prospects when they should be brought out of the house of mental bondage, i.e. the university, to the land flowing with milk and honey, i.e. the West End of London. Mrs. Hillary hinted to Marianetta that propriety, and delicacy, and decorum, and dignity, etc., etc., etc. Would require them to leave the abbey immediately. Marianetta listened in silent submission, for she knew that her inheritance was passive obedience. But when Scythrop, who had watched the opportunity of Mrs. Hillary's departure, entered the abbey, she thought that she would have to leave the abbey immediately. But when Scythrop, who had watched the opportunity of Mrs. Hillary's departure, entered, and, without speaking a word, threw himself at her feet in a paroxysm of grief, the young lady, in equal silence and sorrow, threw her arms round his neck and burst into tears. A very tender scene ensued, which the sympathetic susceptibilities of the soft-hearted reader can more accurately imagine than we can delineate. But when Marianetta hinted that she was to leave the abbey immediately, Scythrop snatched from its repository his ancestor's skull, filled it with Madera, and, presenting himself before Mr. Glowry, threatened to drink off the contents if Mr. Glowry did not immediately promise that Marianetta should not be taken from the abbey without her own consent. Mr. Glowry, who took the Madera to be some deadly bruise, gave the required promise in dismal panic. Scythrop returned to Marianetta with a joyful heart, and drank the Madera by the way. Mr. Glowry, during his residence in London, had come to an agreement with his friend Mr. Tubaad, that a match between Scythrop and Mr. Tubaad's daughter would be a very desirable occurrence. She was finishing her education in a German convent, but Mr. Tubaad described to her as being fully impressed with the treachery of the Madera. Aromani's, in the Persian mythology, is the evil power, the Prince of the Kingdom of Darkness. He is the rival of Oromatsis, the Prince of the Kingdom of Light. These two powers have divided an equal dominion. Sometimes one of the two has a temporary supremacy. According to Mr. Tubaad, the present period would be the reign of Aromani's. Lord Byron seems to be of the same opinion. By the use he is made of Aromani's in Manfred, where the great Alastor of Persia is hailed king of the world by the Nemesis of Greece, in concert with three of the Scandinavian Valkyrie, under the name of the Destinys, the astrological spirits of the Alchemists of the Middle Ages, an elemental witch, transplanted from Denmark to the Alps, and a chorus of Dr. Faustus's devils, who come in the last act for a soul. It is difficult to conceive where this heterogeneous mythological company could have originally met, except at a tabla d'hote like the Six Kings in Candide. End of footnote. We will resume that sentence by repeating it. She was finishing her education in a German convent, but Mr. Tubaad described her as being fully impressed with the truth of his Aromaniic philosophy, and being altogether as gloomy and antithelian a young lady as Mr. Glowrie himself could desire for the future mistress of nightmare Abbey. She had a great fortune in her own right, which was not, as we have seen, without its weight in inducing Mr. Glowrie to set his heart upon her as his daughter-in-law that was to be. He was therefore very much disturbed by Sithrib's untoward attachment to Marionetta. He condoled on the occasion with Mr. Tubaad, who said that he had been too long accustomed to the intermeddling of the devil in all his affairs, to be astonished at this new trace of his cloving claw, but that he hoped to outwit him yet, for he was sure there could be no comparison between his daughter and Marionetta in the mind of any one who had a proper perception of the fact, that the world being a great theatre of evil, seriousness and solemnity are the characteristics of wisdom, and laughter and merriment make a human being no better than a baboon. Mr. Glowrie comforted himself with this view of the subject, and urged Mr. Tubaad to expedite his daughter's return from Germany. Mr. Tubaad said he was in daily expectation of her arrival in London, and would set off immediately to meet her, that he might lose no time in bringing her to nightmare Abbey. Then, he added, we shall see whether Thalia or Melpomani, whether the Allegra or the Pancerosa, will carry off the symbol of victory. There can be no doubt, said Mr. Glowrie, which way the scale will incline, or Sithrib is no true scion of the venerable stem of the Glowrie's. End of chapter. Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock. Marionetta felt secure of Sithrib's heart, and notwithstanding the difficulties that surrounded her, she could not debar herself from the pleasure of tormenting her lover, whom she kept in a perpetual fever. Sometimes she would meet him with the most unqualified affection, sometimes with the most chilling indifference, rousing him to anger by artificial coldness, softening him to love by eloquent tenderness, or inflaming him to jealousy by coquettting with the honourable Mr. Listless, who seemed, under her magical influence, to burst into sudden life, like the bud of the evening primrose. Sometimes she would sit by the piano and listen with becoming attention to Sithrib's pathetic remonstrances. But in the most impassioned part of his oratory, she would convert all his ideas into a chaos by striking up some Rondo Allegro and saying, Is it not pretty? Sithrib would begin to storm and she would answer him with zitti zitti piano piano non vagiamo confuzioni, or some similar facizia, till he would start away from her and enclose himself in his tower, in an agony of agitation, vowing to renounce her and her whole sex, forever, and returning to her presence at the summons of the billet, which she never failed to send with many expressions of penitence and promises of amendment. Sithrib's schemes for regenerating the world, and detecting his seven golden candlesticks, went on very slowly in this fever of his spirit. Things proceeded in this train for several days, and Mr. Glowery began to be uneasy at receiving no intelligence from Mr. Tubad, when one evening the latter rushed into the library, where the family and the visitors were assembled, both cipherating, The devil is come among you, having great wrath! He then drew Mr. Glowery aside into another apartment, and after remaining some time together they re-entered the library with faces of great dismay, but did not condescend to explain to any one the cause of their discomforture. The next morning, early Mr. Tubad departed. Mr. Glowery sighed and groaned all day, and said not a word to any one. Sithrib had quarreled, as usual, with Marionetta, and was enclosed in his tower in a fit of morbid sensibility. Marionetta was comforting herself at the piano, with singing the heirs of Nina Pazza Peremore, and the Honourable Mr. Listless was listening to the harmony, as he lay supine on the sofa, with a book in his hand, into which he peeped at intervals. The Reverend Mr. Larynx approached the sofa and proposed a game at Billiards. The Honourable Mr. Listless. Billiards! Ah! really, I should be very happy, but in my present exhausted state the exertion is too much for me. I do not know when I have been equal to such an effort. He rang the bell for his valet. Fatou entered. Fatou! When did I play at Billiards last? Fatou. De fortine de sombre de l'astier messieurs. Fatou bowed and retired. The Honourable Mr. Listless. So it was. Seven months ago. You see, Mr. Larynx, you see, sir, my nerves, Miss O'Carroll. My nerves are shattered. I have been advised to try bath. Some of the faculty recommend Chaltonham. I think of trying both, as the seasons don't clash. The season, you know, Mr. Larynx. The season, Miss O'Carroll. The season is everything. Marionetta. And health is something, Nespot, Mr. Larynx? The Reverend Mr. Larynx. Mr. Surety, Miss O'Carroll, for however reasoners may dispute about the Somoom Bonim, none of them will deny that a very good dinner is a very good thing. And what is a good dinner without a good appetite? And whence is a good appetite but from good health? Now Chaltonham, Mr. Listless, is famous for good appetites. The Honourable Mr. Listless. The best piece of logic I ever heard, Mr. Larynx. The very best, I assure you. I thought very seriously of Chaltonham, very seriously and profoundly. I thought of it. Let me see. When did I think of it? He rang again and Fatou reappeared. Fatou, when did I think of going to Chaltonham and did not go? Fatou. Dejouillet, 20 vans de la Somoom, messieurs. Fatou retired. The Honourable Mr. Listless. So it was. An invaluable fellow that, Mr. Larynx, invaluable, Miss O'Carroll. Marionnetta. So I should judge indeed he seems to serve you as a walking memory and to be a living chronicle, not of your actions only, but of your thoughts. The Honourable Mr. Listless. An excellent definition of the fellow, Miss O'Carroll. Excellent by my honour. Ha-ha-ha! High-ho! Laughter is pleasant, but the exertion is too much for me. A parcel was brought in for Mr. Listless. It had been sent express. Fatou was summoned to unpack it, and it proved to contain a new novel and a new poem, both of which had long been anxiously expected by the whole host of fashionable readers, and the last number of a popular review, of which the editor and his co-editors were in high favour at court, and enjoyed ample pensions for their services to church and state. Footnote. Pension. Pay given to a slave of state for treason to his country. From John's and's dictionary. End of footnote. As Fatou left the room, Mr. Floskey entered and curiously inspected the literary arrivals. Mr. Floskey turning over the leaves. Devil-man. A novel. Hatred. Revenge. Misanthropy. And quotations from the Bible. This is the morbid anatomy of black bile. Paul Jones. A poem. Hmm. I see how it is. Paul Jones, an amiable enthusiast, disappointed in his affections, turns pirate from ennui and magnanimity. Cuts various masculine throats. Wins various feminine hearts. He is hanged at the yard-arm. The catastrophe is very awkward and very unpoetical. The Downing Street Review. Hmm. First article. An Ode to the Red Book. By Roderick Sackbutt, Esquire. Hmm. His own poem, reviewed by himself. Hmm. Mr. Floskey proceeded in silence to look over the other articles of the review. Marianetta inspected the novel, and Mr. Listless the poem. The Rev. Mr. Larynx. For a young man of fashion and family, Mr. Listless, you seem to be of a very studious turn. The Honourable Mr. Listless. Studious! You are pleased to be facetious, Mr. Larynx. I hope you do not suspect me of being studious. I have finished my education. But there are some fashionable books that one must read, because they are ingredients of the talk of the day. Otherwise, I am no funder of books that I dare say you yourself are, Mr. Larynx. The Rev. Mr. Larynx. Why, sir, I cannot say that I am indeed particularly fond of books. Yet neither can I say that I never do read. A tale or a poem, now and then, to a circle of ladies over their work, is no very heterodox employment of the vocal energy. And I must say, for myself, that few men have a more job-like endurance of the eternally recurring questions and answers that interweave themselves on these occasions, with the crisis of an adventure and heighten the distress of a tragedy. The Honourable Mr. Listless. And very often make the distress when the author has omitted it. Lynetta. I shall try your patience some rainy morning, Mr. Larynx, and Mr. Listless shall recommend us the very newest new book that everybody reads. The Honourable Mr. Listless. You shall receive it, Mr. Carroll, with all the gloss of novelty, fresh as a ripe green gauge in all the downiness of its bloom. A male coach copy from Edinburgh, forwarded express from London. Mr. Floskey. This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor, and, entre new, the best parts of my friends' books were either written or suggested by myself. The Honourable Mr. Listless. Sir, I reverence you, but I must say, modern books are very consolidatory and congenial to my feelings. There is, as it were, a delightful northeast wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them, a delicious misanthropy and discontent that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy and puts me in good humour with myself and my sofa. Mr. Floskey. Very true, sir. Modern literature is a northeast wind, a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Mary, so be it. Ponder thereon. The conversation was interrupted by the reappearance of Mr. Tubad, covered with mud. He just showed himself at the door, muttered, The devil is come among you! and vanished. The road which connected Nightmare Abbey with the civilised world was artificially raised above the level of the fens and ran through them in a straight line as far as the eye could reach, with a ditch on each side of which the water was rendered invisible by the aquatic vegetation that covered the surface. Into one of these ditches the sudden action of a shy horse, which took fright at a windmill, had precipitated the travelling chariot of Mr. Tubad, who had been reduced to the necessity of scrambling in dismal plight through the window. One of the wheels was found to be broken, and Mr. Tubad, leaving the postillian to get the chariot as well as he could to clay-dike for the purpose of cleaning and repairing, had walked back to Nightmare Abbey, followed by his servant with the imperial, and repeating all the way his favourite quotation from the revelations. CHAPTER VI. Mr. Tubad had found his daughter Celinda in London, and after the first joy of meeting was over, told her he had a husband ready for her. The young lady replied, very gravely, that she should take the liberty to choose for herself. Mr. Tubad said he saw the devil was determined to interfere with all his projects, but he was resolved on his own part not to have on his conscience the crime of passive obedience and non-resistance to Lucifer, and therefore she should marry the person he had chosen for her. Miss Tubad replied, Tré-Pos-Mont, she assuredly would not. Celinda, Celinda, said Mr. Tubad, you most assuredly shall. Have I not a fortune in my own right, sir? said Celinda. The more is the pity, said Mr. Tubad, but I can find means, miss. I can find means. There are more ways than one of breaking in obstinate girls. They parted for the night with the expression of opposite resolutions, and in the morning the young lady's chamber was found empty, and what was become of her, Mr. Tubad, had no clue to conjecture. He continued to investigate town and country in search of her, visiting and revisiting Nightmare Abbey at intervals, to consult with his friend, Mr. Glowry. Mr. Glowry agreed with Mr. Tubad that this was a very flagrant instance of filial disobedience and rebellion, and Mr. Tubad declared that when he discovered the fugitive she should find that the devil was come unto her, having great wrath. In the evening the whole party met, as usual, in the library. Marionetta sat at the harp. The Honourable Mr. Listless sat by her and turned over her music, though the exertion was almost too much for him. The Reverend Mr. Larynx relieved him occasionally in this delightful labour. Sithrup, tormented by the demon jealousy, sat in the corner biting his lips and fingers. Marionetta looked at him every now and then with a smile of most provoking good humour, which he pretended not to see, and which only the more exasperated his troubled spirit. He took down a volume of Dante and pretended to be deeply interested in the purgatorio, though he knew not a word he was reading, as Marionetta was well aware, who, tripping across the room, peeped into his book and said to him, "'I see you are in the middle of purgatory.' "'I am in the middle of hell,' said Sithrup furiously. "'Are you?' said she. "'Think come across the room and I will sing you the finale of Don Giovanni.' "'Let me alone,' said Sithrup. Marionetta looked at him with a deprecating smile and said. "'You unjust cross-creature, you!' "'Let me alone,' said Sithrup, but much less emphatically than at first, and by no means wishing to be taken at his word. Marionetta left him immediately, and, returning to the harp, said, just loud enough for Sithrup to hear, "'Did you ever read Dante, Mr. Listless? Sithrup is reading Dante, and is just now in purgatory.' "'And I?' said the honourable Mr. Listless. "'I'm not reading Dante, and I'm just now in paradise,' bowing to Marionetta. "'You are very gallant, Mr. Listless, and I daresay you are very fond of reading Dante?' The honourable Mr. Listless. "'I don't know how it is, but Dante never came in my way till lately. I'd never had him in my collection, and if I had had him, I should not have read him. But I find he is growing fashionable, and I am afraid I must read him some wet morning.' "'Marionetta, no, read him some evening by all means. Were you ever in love, Mr. Listless?' The honourable Mr. Listless. "'I assure you, Mr. Carroll, never, till I came to nightmare Abbey. I daresay it is very pleasant, but it seems to give so much trouble that I fear the exertion would be too much for me.' "'Marionetta, shall I teach you a compendious method of courtship that will give you no trouble whatever?' The honourable Mr. Listless. "'You will confer on me an inexpressible obligation. I am all impatient to learn it.' "'Marionetta, sit with your back to the lady, and read Dante. You be sure to begin in the middle, and turn over three or four pages at once, backwards as well as forwards, and she will immediately perceive that you are desperately in love with her, desperately.' The honourable Mr. Listless, sitting between Sithrup and Marionetta, and fixing all his intention on the beautiful speaker, did not observe Sithrup who was doing as she described. The honourable Mr. Listless. "'You are pleased to be facetious, Miss O'Carroll. The lady would infallibly conclude that I was the greatest brute in town.' Marionetta. "'Far from it. She would say perhaps some people have odd methods of showing their affection.' The honourable Mr. Listless. "'But I should think with submission.' Mr. Floskey, joining them from another part of the room. Did I not hear, Mr. Listless, observe that Dante is becoming fashionable?' The honourable Mr. Listless. "'I did hazard a remark to that effect, Mr. Floskey, though I speak on such subjects with a consciousness of my own nothingness in the presence of so great a man as Mr. Floskey. I know not what is the colour of Dante's devils, but as he is certainly becoming fashionable, I conclude they are blue. For the blue devils, as it seems to me, Mr. Floskey, constitute the fundamental feature of fashionable literature.' "'Mr. Floskey, the blue are indeed the stable commodity. But as they will not always be commanded, the black, red, and grey may be admitted as substitutes. Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution, have played the devil, Mr. Listless, and brought the devil into play.' "'Mr. Tubad, starting up. Having great wrath!' Mr. Floskey. This is no play upon words but the sober sadness of veritable fact.' The honourable Mr. Listless. Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution, I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.' "'Mr. Floskey, I should be sorry if you could. I pity the man who can see the connection of his own ideas. Still more do I pity him, the connection of whose ideas any other person can see. Sir, the great evil is that there is too much commonplace light in our moral and political literature, and light is a great enemy to mystery, and mystery is a great friend to enthusiasm. Now the enthusiasm for abstract truth is an exceedingly fine thing, as long as the truth, which is the object of the enthusiasm, is so completely abstract as to be all together out of reach of the human faculties. And in that sense I have myself an enthusiasm for truth. But in no other, for the pleasure of metaphysical investigation lies in the means, not in the end. And if the end could be found, the pleasure of the means would cease. The mind, to be kept in health, must be kept in exercise. The proper exercise of the mind is elaborate reasoning. Analytical reasoning is a base and mechanical process, which takes to pieces and examines bit by bit the rude material of knowledge, and extracts therefrom a few hard and obstinate things called facts, every thing in the shape of which I cordially hate. But synthetical reasoning, setting up as its goal some unattainable abstraction, like an imaginary quantity and algebra, and commencing its course with taking for granted some two assertions which cannot be proved, from the union of these two assumed truths produces the third assumption, and so on in infinite series, to the unspeakable benefit of the human intellect. The beauty of this process is, that at every step it strikes out into two branches, in a compound ratio of ramification, so that you are perfectly sure of losing your way and keeping your mind in perfect health, by the perpetual exercise of an interminable quest. And for these reasons I have christened my eldest son, Immanuel Kant Floskey. Nothing can be more luminous. The Honorable Mr. Listless. And what is all that to do with Dante and the Blue Devils? Mr. Hillary. Not much I should think with Dante but a great deal with the Blue Devils. Mr. Floskey. It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is hag-ridden. She has shattered our nerves. Late dinners make us slaves of indigestion. The French Revolution has made us shrink from the name of philosophy, and has destroyed, in the more refined part of the community, of which number I am one, all enthusiasm for political liberty. That part of the reading public, which shuns the solid food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce-piquant to the palate of its depraved imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons. I and my friend Mr. Sackbutt served up a few of the best. To leave in the devil himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became to base common and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness. And now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence. The whole secret of which lies in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise character in which we should be most certain not to find it in the living world, and making the single virtue not only redeem all the real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments, and characteristics of the said virtue. Mr. Too-Bad, that is, because the devil is come among us, and finds it for his interest to destroy all our perceptions of the distinctions of right and wrong, marionetta, I do not precisely enter into your meaning, Mr. Floskey, and should be glad if you would make it a little more plain to me. Mr. Floskey. One or two examples will do it, Miss O'Carroll. If I were to take all the mean and sordid qualities of a money-dealing Jew, and tack on to them, as with a nail, the quality of extreme benevolence, I should have a very decent hero for a modern novel, and should contribute my quota to the fashionable method of administering a mass of vice, under a thin and unnatural covering of virtue, like a spider wrapped in a bit of gold leaf, and administered as a wholesome pill. On the same principle, if a man knocks me down, and takes my purse and watch by main force, I turn him to account, and set him forth in a tragedy as a dashing young fellow disinherited for his romantic generosity, and full of a most amiable hatred of the world in general, and his own country in particular, and of a most enlightened and chivalrous affection for himself. Then, with the addition of a wild girl to fall in love with him, and a series of adventures in which they break all the ten commandments in succession, always you will observe for some sublime motive, which must be carefully analysed in its progress. I have as amiable a pair of tragic characters as ever issued from that new region of the Bellet, which I have called the morbid anatomy of black bile, and which is greatly to be admired and rejoiced at, as affording a fine scope for the exhibition of mental power. Which is about as well employed as the power of a hot-house would be, enforcing up a nettle to the size of an elm. If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be, to remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world. The Honourable Mr. Listless. It seems to be the case with us at present, or we should not have interrupted Miss O'Carroll's music with this exceedingly dry conversation. Mr. Flotsky. I should be most happy if Miss O'Carroll would remind us that there are yet both music and sunshine. The Honourable Mr. Listless. In the voice and smile of beauty, may I entreat the favour of— in turning over the pages of music. All were silent, and Mary Annetta sang, Why are there looks so blank, Greyfriar? Why are there looks so blue? Thou seemest more pale and like, Greyfriar, than thou was used to do? Say, what has made thee rue? Thy form was plump, and a light did shine in thy round and ruby face, which showed an outward visible sign of an inward spiritual grace. Say, what has changed thy case? Yet will I tell thee, true Greyfriar, I very well can see, that if thy looks are blue, Greyfriar, Tis all for love of me. Tis all for love of me. But breathe not thy vows to me, Greyfriar, O breathe them not, I pray. For ill be seams in a reverend friar the love of a mortal may, and I needs must say thee nay. But couldst thou think my heart to move with that pale and silent scowl? No, he who would win a maiden's love, whether clad in cap or cowl, must be more of a lark than an owl. Grip immediately replaced Dante on the shelf, and joined the circle round the beautiful singer. Marionetta gave him a smile of approbation that fully restored his complacency, and they continued on the best possible terms during the remainder of the evening. The honourable Mr. Listless turned over the leaves with double alacrity, saying, You are severe upon invalids, Miss O'Carroll. To escape your satire, I must try to be sprightly, though the exertion is too much for me. CHAPTER 7 A NEW VISITOR ARRIVED AT THE ABBY, IN THE PERSON OF MR. ASTERIUS, THE ICTHEOLOGIST. This gentleman had passed his life in seeking the living wonders of the deep through the four quarters of the world. He had a cabinet of stuffed and dried fishes, of shells, sea-weeds, corals, and majorpores that was the admiration and envy of the royal society. He had penetrated into the watery den of the sepia octopus, disturbed the conjugal happiness of that turtle dove of the ocean, and come off victorious in a sanguinary conflict. He had been becalmed in the tropical seas, and had watched in eager expectation, though unhappily, always in vain, to see the colossal polypus rise from the water, and entwine its enormous arms round the masts and the rigging. He maintained the origin of all things from water, and insisted that the polypods were the first of animated things, and that, from their round bodies and many shooting arms, the Hindus had taken their gods, the most ancient of deities. But the chief object of his ambition, the end and aim of his researches, was to discover a triton and a mermaid, the existence of which he most potently and implicitly believed, and was prepared to demonstrate a priori, a posteriori, a fortiori, synthetically and analytically, syllogistically and inductively, by arguments deduced both from acknowledged facts and plausible hypotheses. A report that a mermaid had been seen sleaking her soft alluring locks on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire had brought him in great haste from London to pay a long-promised and often postponed visit to his old acquaintance, Mr. Glowry. Mr. Asterius was accompanied by his son, to whom he had given the name of Aquarius, flattering himself that he would, in the process of time, become a constellation among the stars of ichthyological science. What charitable female had lent him the mould in which this son was cast, no one pretended to know, and, as he never dropped the most distant allusion to Aquarius's mother, some of the wags of London maintained that he had received the favours of a mermaid, and that the scientific perquisitions which kept him always prowling about the seashore were directed by the less philosophical motive of regaining his lost love. Mr. Asterius perlustrated the sea-coast for several days, and reaped disappointment, but not despair. One night, shortly after his arrival, he was sitting in one of the windows of the library, looking towards the sea, when his attention was attracted by a figure which was moving near the edge of the surf, and which was dimly visible through the moonless summer night. Its motions were irregular, like those of a person in a state of indecision. It had extremely long hair, which floated in the wind. Whatever else it might be, it certainly was not a fisherman. It might be a lady, but it was neither Mrs. Hillary nor Miss O'Carroll, for they were both in the library. It might be one of the female servants, but it had too much grace, and too striking an air of habitual liberty to render it probable. Besides, what should one of the female servants be doing there at this hour, moving to and fro as it seemed, without any visible purpose? It could scarcely be a stranger, for Clay Dyke, the nearest village, was ten miles distant, and what female would come ten miles across the fence, for no purpose but to hover over the surf under the walls of Nightmare Abbey? Might it not be a mermaid? It was possibly a mermaid. It was probably a mermaid. It was very probably a mermaid. Nay, what else could it be but a mermaid? It certainly was a mermaid. Mr. Osterius stole out of the library on tiptoe, with his finger on his lips, having beckoned Aquarius to follow him. The rest of the party was in great surprise at Mr. Osterius's movement, and some of them approached the window to see if the locality would tend to elucidate the mystery. Presently they saw him and Aquarius cautiously stealing along on the other side of the moat, but they saw nothing more, and Mr. Osterius returning told them, with accents of great disappointment, that he had had a glimpse of a mermaid, but she had eluded him in the darkness, and was gone, he presumed, to sup with some enamored triton in a submarine grotto. But seriously, Mr. Osterius, said the Honourable Mr. Listless, Do you positively believe there are such things as mermaids? Mr. Osterius, most assuredly, and tritons too. The Honourable Mr. Listless, What? Things that are half human and half fish? Mr. Osterius. Precisely they are the Oran altangs of the sea, but I am persuaded that they are also complete semen, differing in no respect from us, but that they are stupid, and covered with scales. For though our organization seems to exclude us essentially from the class of amphibious animals, yet Anonymous well know that the Foramen ovale may remain open in an adult, and that respiration is, in that case, not necessary to life. And how can it be otherwise explained that the Indian divers, employed in the pearl fishery, pass whole hours under the water, and that the famous Swedish gardener of Troningholm lived a day and a half under the ice without being drowned? A nereid, or mermaid, was taken in the year 1403 in a Dutch lake, and was in every respect like a French woman, except that she did not speak. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, an English ship, a hundred and fifty leagues from land in the Greenland seas, discovered a flotilla of sixty or seventy little skiffs, in each of which was a triton, or seaman. At the approach of the English vessel the hold of them, seized with simultaneous fear, discovered skiffs and all under the water, as if they had been a human variety of the nautilus. The illustrious Don Feijoux has preserved an authentic and well-attested story of a young Spaniard named Francis de la Vega, who, bathing with some of his friends in June 1674, suddenly dived under the sea and rose no more. His friends thought him drowned. They were plebeians and pious Catholics, but a philosopher might very legitimately have drawn the same conclusion. The Rev. Mr. Larynx. Nothing could be more logical. Mr. Hysterious. Five years afterwards some fishermen near Cadiz found in their nets a triton, or seaman. They spoke to him in several languages. The Rev. Mr. Larynx. They were very learned fishermen. Mr. Hillary. They had the gift of tongues by a special favour of their brother fisherman, St. Peter. The Honourable Mr. Lyslis. Is St. Peter the tutelor saint of Cadiz? None of the company could answer this question, and Mr. Hysterious proceeded. They spoke to him in several languages, but he was as mute as a fish. They handed him over to some holy friars who exercised him, but the devil was mute too. After some days he pronounced the name Lierganis. A monk took him to that village. His mother and brothers recognised and embraced him, but he was as insensible to their caresses as any other fish would have been. He had some scales on his body, which dropped off by degrees, but his skin was as hard and rough as chagrin. He stayed at home nine years without recovering his speech or his reason. He then disappeared again, in one of his old acquaintances some years after, saw him pop his head out of the water near the coast of the Hysterious. These facts were certified by his brothers and by Don Giaspardo de la Riva Aguero, Knight of St. James, who lived near Lierganis, and often had the pleasure of our Triton's company to dinner. Pliny mentions an embassy of the Alisaponians to Tiberius to give him intelligence of a Triton which had been heard playing on its shell in a certain cave, with certain other authenticated facts on the subject of Tritons and Niriads. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. You astonish me. I have been much on the seashore in the season, but I do not think I ever saw a mermaid. He rang and summoned Fatou, who made his appearance half-seize over. Fatou, did I ever see a mermaid? Fatou. Mermaid. Mermaid. Ah! Merry maid. Oui, monsieur. Yes, sir. Very many. I wish there was one or two here in the kitchen. Maffois. They be all as melancholic as so many tombstone. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. I mean Fatou, an odd kind of human fish. Fatou. C'est un fish. Ah, oui. I understand the phrase. They have seen nothing else since we left town, Maffois. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. You seem to have had a cup too much, sir. Fatou. Non, monsieur. De cup too little. The femme be very unwholesome, and I drink at the ponch, vid raven de butler, to keep out de bad air. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. Fatou. I insist on your being sober. Fatou. Oui, monsieur. I will be as sober as the reverendissime Père Jean. I should be very glad of the merry maid, but de butler bead de odd fish, and he swim in de bold de ponch. Ah! Ah! You recollect, de little, a song about fair maids, and about fair maids, and about my merry maids all. Fatou reeled out, singing. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. I am overwhelmed. I never saw the rascal in such a condition before. But will you allow me, monsieur Astéries, to inquire into the qui bono of all the pains and expense you have incurred to discover a mermaid? The qui bono, sir, is the question I always take the liberty to ask when I see anyone taking much trouble for any object. I am myself a sort of senior poco purante, and should like to know if there be anything better or pleasanter than the state of existing and doing nothing. Mr. Astéries. I have made many voyages, Mr. Lislis, to remote and barren shores. I have travelled over deserts and inhospitable lands. I have defied danger. I have endured fatigue. I have submitted to privation. In the midst of these I have experienced pleasures which I would not at any time have exchanged for that of existing and doing nothing. I have known many evils, but I have never known the worst of all, which, as it seems to me, are those which are comprehended in the inexhaustible varieties of ennuis, spleen, chagrin, vapours, blue devils, time-killing, discontent, misanthropy, and all their interminable train of fretfulness, fearlessness, suspicions, jealousies, and fears, which have alike infected society and the literature of society, and which would make an arctic ocean of the human mind if the more humane pursuits of philosophy and science did not keep alive the better feelings and more valuable energies of our nature. The Honourable Mr. Lislis. You are pleased to be severe upon our fashionable belletre, Mr. Asterius. Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder are the only bow-idale of the active, asplanetic and railing misanthropy is of speculative energy, a gloomy brow, and a tragical voice seem to have been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners, in a morbid, withering, deadly, antisocial sorocco, loaded with moral and political despair, breathes through all the grove-zoned valleys of the modern Parnassus, while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth the lights equally pure and vivid, to maturity, calm and grateful occupation, to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection. And while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment. Ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day. Of a beautiful day, see Denis Montfort, Histoire Naturelle de Molosque, Vue Generale, pages 37 and 38. The second half of this speech by Mr. Asterius and the opening sentence of his previous speech are a paraphrase from Montfort, pages 37 through 39. End of footnote. The Honourable Mr. Listless. Really, I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college, I can try to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company, dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading, and that amiable discontent and anti-sociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favorite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing anything for. But is there not in such compositions a kind of unconscious self-detection, which seems to carry their own antidote with them? For surely no one who cordially and truly either hates or despises the world will publish a volume every three months to say so? Mr. Floskey. There is a secret in all this which I will elucidate with a dusky remark. According to Berkeley, the essay of things is per se pi. They exist as they are perceived. But leaving for the present, as far as relates to the material world, the materialists, hallowists, and anti-hellowists, to settle this point among them, which is indeed a subtle question raised among those out of their wits and those in the wrong. But only we transcendentalists are in the right. We may very safely assert that the essay of happiness is per se pi. It exists as it is perceived. It is the mind that maketh well or ill. The elements of pleasure and pain are everywhere. The degree of happiness that any circumstances or objects can confer on us depends on the mental disposition with which we approach them. If you consider what is meant by the common phrases, a happy disposition and a discontented temper, you will perceive that the truth for which I am contending is universally admitted. Mr. Floskey suddenly stopped. He found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense. Mr. Hillary. It's very true. A happy disposition finds materials of enjoyment everywhere. In city or the country, in society or in solitude, in the theatre or the forest, in the hum of the multitude, or in the silence of the mountains, are alike materials of reflection and elements of pleasure. It is one mode of pleasure to listen to the music of Don Giovanni, in a theatre glittering with light, and crowded with elegance and beauty. It is another to glide its sunset over the bosom of a lonely lake, where no sound disturbs the silence but the motion of the boat through the waters. A happy disposition derives pleasure from both, a discontented temper from neither, but is always busy in detecting deficiencies and feeding dissatisfaction with comparisons. The one gathers all the flowers, the other all the nettles in its path. The one has the faculty of enjoying everything, the other of enjoying nothing. The one realizes all the pleasure of the present good, the other converts it into pain by pining after something better, which is only better because it is not present, and which, if it were present, would not be enjoyed. These morbid spirits are in life what profess critics are in literature. They see nothing but faults, because they are predetermined to shut their eyes to beauties. The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy, that which rises in spite of him he will not see, and that he complains of the decline of literature. In like manner these cankers of society complain of human nature and society when they have willfully debarred themselves from all the good they contain, and done their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around them. Society is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence, but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarreling with the world for not being better treated than it deserves. Scythrip to Marionetta These remarks are rather uncharitable. There is great good in human nature, but it is at present ill-conditioned. Human spirits cannot but be dissatisfied with things as they are, and according to their views of the probabilities of amelioration they will rush into the extremes of either hope or despair, of which the first is enthusiasm and the second misanthropy, but their sources in this case are the same, as the seven and the y run in different directions and both rise in plin liman. Marionetta. And there is salmon in both, for their resemblances about as close as that between Macedon and Mammoth. 8 Marionetta observed the next day a remarkable perturbation in Scythrip, for which she could not imagine any probable cause. She was willing to believe at first that it had some transient and trifling source and would pass off in a day or two, but contrary to this expectation it daily increased. She was well aware that Scythrip had a strong tendency to the love of mystery for its own sake. That is to say he would employ mystery to serve a purpose but would first choose his purpose by its capability of mystery. He seemed now to have more mystery on his hands than the laws of the system allowed, and to wear his coat of darkness with an air of great discomfort. Her little playful arts lost by degrees much of their power, either to irritate or to soothe, and the first perception of her diminished influence produced in her an immediate depression of spirits and a consequent sadness of demeanor that rendered her very interesting to Mr. Glowry, who, duly considering the improbability of accomplishing his wishes with respect to Miss Tubad, which improbability naturally increased in the diurnal ratio of that young lady's absence, began to reconcile himself by degrees to the idea of Maryonetta being his daughter. Maryonetta made many ineffectual attempts to extract from Scythrip the secret of his mystery, and in despair of drawing it from himself began to form hopes that she might find a clue to it from Mr. Floskey, who was Scythrip's dearest friend, and was more frequently than any other person admitted to his solitary tower. Mr. Floskey, however, had ceased to be visible in the morning. He was engaged in the composition of a dismal ballad, and Maryonetta's uneasiness overcoming her scruples of decorum, she determined to seek him in the apartment which he had chosen for his study. She tapped at the door, and at the sound, Come in! entered the apartment. It was noon, and the sun was shining in full splendor much to the annoyance of Mr. Floskey, who had obviated the inconvenience by closing the shutters and drawing the window curtains. He was sitting at his table by the light of a solitary candle, with a pen in one hand, and a muffaneer in the other, with which he occasionally sprinkled salt on the wick to make it burn blue. He sat with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, and turned his inspired gaze on Maryonetta as if she had been the ghastly lady of a magical vision. Then placed his hand before his eyes, with an appearance of manifest pain, shook his head, withdrew his hand, rubbed his eyes like a waking man, and said, in a tone of rooffulness most Jeremy Taylorically pathetic, to what am I to attribute this very unexpected pleasure, my dear Miss O'Carroll. Maryonetta. I must apologize for intruding on you, Mr. Floskey, but the interest which I—you—take in my cousin Sithrup—Mr. Floskey. Pardon me, Miss O'Carroll. I do not take any interest in any person or thing on the face of the earth. Which sentiment, if you analyze it, you will find to be the quintessence of the most refined philanthropy. Maryonetta. I will take it for granted that it is so, Mr. Floskey. I am not conversant with metaphysical subtleties, but— Mr. Floskey. Subtleties. My dear Miss O'Carroll, I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words involving a juxtaposition of anti-parastatical ideas immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology. Maryonetta. Indeed, Mr. Floskey, it suggests no such notion to me. I have sought you for the purpose of obtaining information. Mr. Floskey, shaking his head, no one ever sought me for such a purpose before. Maryonetta. I think, Mr. Floskey, that is, I believe—that is, I fancy—that is, I imagine—Mr. Floskey. The idaist, the shioe, the seita dear, the that is. My dear Miss O'Carroll, is not applicable in this case, if you will permit me to take the liberty of saying so. Think is not synonymous with believe, for belief, in many most important particulars, results from the total absence, the absolute negation of thought, and is thereby the sane and orthodox condition of mind, and thought and belief are both essentially different from fancy, and fancy, again, is distinct from imagination. This distinction between fancy and imagination is one of the most abstruse and important points of metaphysics. I have written seven hundred pages of promise to elucidate it, which promise I shall keep as faithfully as the bank will its promise to pay. Maryonetta. I assure you, Mr. Floskey, I care no more about metaphysics than I do about the bank, and if you will condescend to talk to a simple girl in intelligible terms—Mr. Floskey. Say not condescend. Know you not that you talk to the most humble of men, to one who has buckled on the armour of sanctity and clothed himself with humility as with a garment? Maryonetta. My cousin Sithirp has of late had an air of mystery about him, which gives me great uneasiness. Mr. Floskey. That is strange. Nothing is so becoming to a man as an air of mystery. Mystery is the very keystone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery. It is such stuff as dreams are made of, and is indeed stuff made of a dream. For last night I fell asleep as usual over my book, and had a vision of pure reason. I composed five hundred lines in my sleep, so that, having had a dream of a ballad, I am now officiating as my own Peter Quince, and making a ballad of my dream, and it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it has no bottom. Maryonetta. I see, Mr. Floskey, you think my intrusion unseasonable, and are inclined to punish it by talking nonsense to me. Mr. Floskey gave a start at the word nonsense, which almost overturned the table. I assure you I would not have intruded if I had not been very much interested in the question I wished to ask you. Mr. Floskey listened in sullen dignity. My cousin Sithra seems to have some secret praying on his mind. Mr. Floskey was silent. He seems very unhappy, Mr. Floskey. Perhaps you are acquainted with the cause. Mr. Floskey was still silent. I only wish to know, Mr. Floskey, if it is anything that could be remedied by anything that any one of whom I know anything could do. Mr. Floskey, after a pause. There are various ways of getting at secrets. The most approved methods, as recommended both theoretically and practically in philosophical novels, are eavesdropping at keyholes, picking the locks of chests and desks, peeping into letters, steaming wafers, and insinuating hot wire under ceiling wax, none of which methods I hold it lawful to practice. Maryonetta. Surely, Mr. Floskey, you cannot suspect me of wishing to adopt or encourage such base and contemptible arts. Mr. Floskey. Yet are they recommended, and with well-strung reasons, by writers of gravity and note, as simple and easy methods of studying character and gratifying that laudable curiosity which aims at the knowledge of man. Maryonetta. I am as ignorant of this morality which you do not approve, as of the metaphysics which you do. I should be glad to know by your means what is the matter with my cousin. I do not like to see him unhappy, and I suppose there is some reason for it. Mr. Floskey. Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it. It is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace. To be so without any is the province of genius. The art of being miserable for misery's sake has been brought to great perfection in our days, and the ancient odyssey which held forth a shining example of the endurance of real misfortune, will give place to a modern one, setting out a more instructive picture of quarrelous impatience under imaginary evils. Maryonetta. Will you oblige me, Mr. Floskey, by giving me a plain answer to a plain question? Mr. Floskey. It is impossible, my dear Miss O'Carroll. I never gave a plain answer to a question in my life. Maryonetta. Do you or do you not know what is the matter with my cousin? Mr. Floskey. To say that I do not know would be to say that I am ignorant of something, and God forbid that a transcendental metaphysician who has pure anticipated cognitions of everything, and carries the whole science of geometry in his head without ever having looked into Euclid, should fall into so empirical an error as to declare himself ignorant of anything. To say that I do not know would be to pretend to positive and circumstantial knowledge touching present matter of fact, which when you consider the nature of evidence, and the various lights in which the same thing may be seen, Maryonetta. I see, Mr. Floskey, that either you have no information, or are determined not to impart it, and I beg your pardon for having given you this unnecessary trouble. Mr. Floskey. My dear Miss O'Carroll, it would have given me great pleasure to have said anything that would have given you pleasure. But if any person living could make report of having obtained any information on any subject from Ferdinando Floskey, my transcendental reputation would be ruined for ever.